Dairy farm fails to clean up act Country Acres of Dixmont found in contempt of court agreement

BANGOR – A federal judge Friday found a Dixmont dairy farmer in contempt of a court-approved consent agreement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that requires seven actions to clean up waste water and manure that has been allowed to flow into Martin Stream.

U.S. District Judge John Woodcock set Tuesday as the deadline by which Carl D. McCue, owner of Country Acres Inc. on Route 7, must file with the court a signed agreement with the company that will perform the work.

The Environmental Enforcement Section of the U.S. Department of Justice, which in January sued McCue of Hampden in U.S. District Court in Bangor, must approve the cleanup plan, the judge ordered.

If McCue does not meet the deadline, contempt of court fines of $2,000 per day would kick in on Wednesday. He and the dairy farm also could face fines of $32,500 per day for violating the consent order that McCue voluntarily entered into in March.

“It is absolutely essential that the defendant Mr. McCue know that this court is serious,” Woodcock said, “and that when an individual is polluting and causing environmental harm or a business has done so, there has to be a day of reckoning. That day is today.”

Country Acres was the first farm in Maine to be regulated by the federal government as a “concentrated animal feeding operation,” or CAFO. In March, the farm housed between 250 and 300 cows and had planned to expand to 800 animals later this year.

The judge said Friday that the reasons McCue’s attorney David J. Van Dyke of Lewiston cited in his response to the contempt motion for his client’s not getting the cleanup done did not meet the legal standard set by the U.S. 1st Circuit Court of Appeals.

To not be found in contempt, McCue would have had to convince the court that meeting the terms outlined in the consent agreement was “impossible,” Woodcock said.Van Dyke said that McCue had been unable to secure financing to pay for the cleanup because the farm had no cash or financial reserves and no source of revenue because the milking herd had been removed from the property.

He also said that neither McCue nor his family had “any resources whatsoever” nor access to credit.

Estimates on the cost of the cleanup ranged from $50,000 to $100,000. The cost of making the farm environmentally compliant, buying back the herd and getting the farm running again was estimated to be $1.7 million, according to court documents.

Negotiations with Agri-Max Financial Services delayed Friday’s hearing by about 15 minutes. Van Dyke submitted to the court a copy of an agreement between McCue and the national lending firm that offers loans and lines of credit to farmers to finance the cleanup.

The contents of the document were not made public.

In March, McCue agreed to remove wastes from an existing storage lagoon, prevent runoff from a pile of manure, patch a leak in a manure storage lagoon and begin spreading remaining wastes on May 1. When nothing had been done by July 1, the government filed the contempt motion.

Van Dyke, McCue and attorneys with the Department of Justice declined to comment Friday on the judge’s decision.